Merchants decry blight along East Main Street

by Art Thomason - Mar. 3, 2011 12:00 AMArizona Business Gazette

From scores of vacated commercial outlets to burned-out buildings and empty lots, stretches of Mesa's east Main Street are a blighted testament to poor land-use zoning, overbuilding and an exodus of retailers to the malls.

The mostly modest shops and services that remain are desperate for help, hoping for revival with infill redevelopment despite the fact that the city has few tools available to deal with some of the worst symptoms.

"No one is going to invest in an area with boarded-up windows," said Mesa Mayor Scott Smith, who is leading an effort near the western end of town to revitalize the Fiesta District, once the city's most vibrant retail marketplace.

Ten miles east, Tara Treadway stood in her office about a block from a motel that was gutted by fire 15 months ago. She sees all the attention paid to the Fiesta District and wonders why the Main Street eyesore in her neighborhood hasn't been razed.

"If your house burned down in a neighborhood, you'd have to remove the mess," said Treadway, who manages an insecticide company. "So why doesn't the city have a law requiring businesses to do the same thing?"

That thought occurred to Councilman Alex Finter two years ago when he asked city administrators to seek legal tools to demolish such buildings, with or without the owner's consent.

His proposal has yielded no remedies, and what's left of the San Dee Motel still stands just west of Power Road, one of the city's most traveled arteries. City officials are hoping to have the motel torn down in the near future, said Christine Zielonka, director of the Mesa Development and Sustainability Department.

"We have been working with the City Attorney's Office to make sure that we first jump through all the legal hoops," Zielonka said.

But across the street from the motel, a gas station that has been vacant for months is surrounded by another chain-link fence. And within a block, a single-story building with boarded up windows has been vacant for a year. An empty lot to its west is littered with weeds.

A mile west, Buckhorn Baths, the once-famed spa and Mesa landmark, is deteriorating from old age and its closing a decade ago.

The 15-acre site, which opened in 1935 as a trading post, is up for sale, and there is interest in restoring the complex.

Efforts to revitalize marketplaces are not hard to find.

"If there were more places like this that are kept up with the 50- to- 60-year-old feel I would come back more often," said Barbara Wagner of Gilbert after shopping at Sun Valley Plaza, a recently refurbished shopping center.

The center's owner, developer Michael Pollack, said creative uses of commercial outlets and turning unproductive property into high-density residential units could put East Main back on its feet.

"Main Street needs more people living along or near it to support the businesses," he said.

But the city needs to step in to attack blight, he said

"The city should surely have the ability to tear down those structures as soon as the property owner settles with the insurance company," Pollack said.

But it doesn't work that way in Mesa, which has historically been reluctant to tell individual owners what they can and can't do with their property.